two cards from a friend

two cards from a friend

Originally uploaded by anetz.

It is 2008. At the start of the year I thought of all the friends I have made.From the time I was a little girl called dagsa or driftwood because we were not originally from that barrio.

I learned to fit in by speaking the dialect which was different from the one I spoke at home with family. Most of my classmates could not afford any kind of footwear, so I hid shoes or wooden clogs in the bushes along the roadside while walking to school.

Whenever we had to speak English in school, I made sure that I sounded just like my classmates. Whenever I had to speak it in my mother’s presence, I had to speak it the way she taught us to speak it, in her English teacher’s way.

Later, many of my friends were penfriends. I was always reaching out to the farthest points of the globe it seemed. The written word fascinated me. So did captured images, photographs. My grandfather encouraged me. We searched the pen pal section of the Philippine Free Press for likely candidates for my pre-pubescent yearnings.

These cards are from a friend who was a well known photographer. She took photographs of people she admired, as a passion, apart from the photographs she took for a living. These people were mainly writers.

So there was this confluence of photography and words again.

We were not to meet. She lives in my memory now that she no longer lives to photograph her beloved Paris.

She also lives on in the letters and cards she wrote me. And these will live on after I am gone in the archives of a university library.

I still have friends whose lines of love are cast over the seas and through space. I do likewise.

It is still possible to have beautiful, sustaining friendships in this troubled world.

Often I see film clips of devastated areas- bombings, civil wars, droughts, natural disasters in the evening news on television. Many are made to sound as if they were the nest of nothing else but terrorists and the most impoverished with unenlightened leaders.

But I know otherwise. I have friends there.

On a one to one basis that friendship is, a country becomes better known.

There is always a heart.

There is always a soul.